14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has denied that any user accounts have been compromised. The statement comes after Mauritania Attacker, a member of AnonGhost, leaked the details of 15,000 accounts and claimed to have gained access to Twitter’s entire user database.
The leaked data – comprised of Twitter IDs, usernames, OAuth tokens and secret OAuth tokens – was published by the hacker on Zippyshare.
“We have investigated the situation and can confirm that no Twitter accounts were compromised,” Twitter representatives have told The Guardian.
Lee J of Cyber War News has also confirmed that the data doesn’t come from Twitter.
He has determined that the data is old, mostly being comprised of suspended and inactive accounts. The information has been most likely taken from a Turkey-based service.
In reality, the AnonGhost collective, of which Mauritania Attacker is part of, is known for suspicious hacks.
In OpIsrael, the group claimed to have hacked over 100,000 websites, 40,000 Facebook accounts and 5,000 Twitter accounts, causing losses of billions of dollars.
Both experts and Israeli officials have determined that, in reality, there was hardly any real damage.
AnonGhost also took part in OpUSA, another campaign that consisted mainly of fake leaks, “pedestrian” DDOS attacks, and small website defacements.
In June, the same group also claimed to have obtained the email logins of Mozilla managers. The company immediately clarified that the 16-character strings leaked by the hackers were not passwords.
The group hacked and defaced hundreds, maybe thousands of websites in the past. However, their claims, especially in the case of data leaks, should not be trusted without a thorough analysis of the published information.